Installation and Finished Product

To prep the back plate, I took the screws with the large heads on them, aligned them in the correct holes for our LGA1150 test system, and once the head of them slips into the frame of the back plate, you then hold it all in place with the soft rubber caps that slide over both parts.

The back plate just fits inside of the access hole in the Thermal Armor of this ASUS motherboard, but it does fit, and that is what we needed. Even though the other side of the plate is plastic coated, the rubber caps actually raise the plate a bit more, and it definitely will not accidentally ground anything out.

All we has to do was set the risers on the screws that came through the motherboard, add the Intel top brackets and tighten them in with the knurled nuts. After that we placed some thermal paste, placed the cross bar into the base, and without the fan in the middle, there is room to get a screwdriver in to secure this massive cooler.

We did have to remove the flame tips of our memory, but just to clear the fan, and not the Assassin's cooler body. From this angle, outside of the fan, a bit of cooler behind it, and the memory, there is nothing else to see since this cooler blocks it all out.

For my configuration of two sticks of memory, the cooler does not interfere with my installation. If you are populating all four slots, you need to take the height of the memory into consideration, but you may also not be able to remove the closest stick once the cooler is mounted.

As it hangs from our motherboard, you can see nothing but cooler above the GPU on the right three-fourths of the motherboard. While this cooler may cause issues populating the first PCI-e slot, or ever getting a view of your memory again, it does leave room at the back to access the 8-pin, and also offers spacing for an exhaust fan on the cooler, and at the back of the chassis.